On Sun, Mar 2, 2008 at 3:26 PM, M.-A. Lemburg <[EMAIL PROTECTED]> wrote: > On 2008-03-02 23:11, Greg Ewing wrote: > > M.-A. Lemburg wrote: > >> Why not also make unicode() the default type constructor and only > >> keep str() as alias to simplify porting (perhaps with a warning) ? > > > > -1 on making us type 7 characters instead of > > 3 all over the place. > > Oh well... how about "text()" ?
Sorry, this was discussed and decided long ago. I'm not going to change this now. The type is called string or some variation thereof in most other popular languages. > >> The term "string" is just too overloaded with all kinds of > >> misinterpretations. The term "string" just refers to a string of > >> bytes - a variable length array so to speak. > > > > I disagree -- "string" has come to mean "string of > > characters" unless otherwise qualified. Using one > > to hold non-characters is just an aberration that > > was necessary in Python 2 because there wasn't much > > alternative. Historically that's incorrect. In 1990, when Unicode hadn't even been invented, 'str' was very intentionally designed to hold text and data equally well. > Buffer objects have been around for years and for exactly > this purpose. No, buffer objects were not invented to *hold* binary data. The buffer API was invented to *reference* bytes that were owned by 3rd party C libraries. Its descendant in Py3k, 'memoryview' (see PEP 3118) has the same purpose without having the same bugs. For *holding* bytes in Py3k we'll use bytes (immutable) or bytearray (mutable). -- --Guido van Rossum (home page: http://www.python.org/~guido/) _______________________________________________ Python-Dev mailing list Python-Dev@python.org http://mail.python.org/mailman/listinfo/python-dev Unsubscribe: http://mail.python.org/mailman/options/python-dev/archive%40mail-archive.com
